Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

I love:

Piano Concerto No 1 (first record I ever bought, Herbert von Karajan and Yevgeny Kissin with the Berlin Philharmonic)

Violin Concerto

All the symphonies

Eugen Onegin, the opera (the book by Pushkin is a must read too)

Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the ballets

Peter & the Wolf and The Nutcracker

Homosexual! Although his native country is in deep denial about that little fact.

R3 I honest think that is what made his music sound so good.

The Piano Concerto #1 is awesome. I prefer the legendary version by tall cowboy twink legend Van Cliburn & Kondrashin.

I love Karajan & the BPO’s versions of Symphony 4, 5, & 6.

It’s hard not to like his ballet music and overtures.

The June movement from his Seasons is also lovely.

R4, true. I think he harnessed that pain and repression into musical brilliance.

Love him!

[quote] Two Piano Concertos

OP: Some of Tchaikovsky’s music is somewhat obscure. There’s a third piano concerto that’s a single movement and was repurposed from a symphony that Tchaikovsky abandoned. I found out about the second and third concertos in the 1970s from an Ormandy/Graffman LP. I think those concertos were considered something of an oddity then.

[quote] Five Symphonies

Six symphonies (Symphonies 1-3 are infrequently played or recorded compared with Symphonies 4-6).

There’s also an unnumbered symphony named the “Manfred Symphony.”

Link below is to a list and description of Tchaikovsky’s works.

I agree with you OP about Tchaikovsky’s music. I still find pieces I didn’t know about even after decades of listening to his music.

Actually "Peter and the Wolf" is by Prokofiev, not Tchaikovsky, though it's great nonetheless.

Tchaikovsky's 1st piano concerto and all the pieces from "The Nutcracker" are my favorites so far, but there's a lot I still haven't heard yet.

Like all great composers Tchaikovsky had a gift for melody lines.

American pianist Van Cliburn won the first ever International Tchaikovsky Competition, in Moscow during the Cold War in 1958, at the age of 23. He played Tchaikovsky's 1st piano concerto and Rachmaninoff's 3rd.

The judges were all set up to award a Russian pianist as winner, but Kruschev asked them, "Who was the best?" They admitted Cliburn was and he said. "Well, give it to him!" Cliburn became a star in both Moscow and the U.S.

[quote]What are your favorite pieces by him?

The Variations on a Rococo Theme

I love the Nocturne in D minor, Op. 19 No. 4 from the Six Pieces (Six Morceaux) for solo piano, Op. 19 (TH 133 ; ČW 112 to 117).

I also love the arrangement of the Nocturne that Tchaikovsky made for cello and orchestra.

Let's not forget Romeo and Juliet

I listen to The Nutcracker all year long.

Serenade for Strings is sublime.

Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikovsky's First Symphony, "Winter."

Serenade is certainly sublime.

Sleeping Beauty. The thing is shot through with genius. Some pieces are lovely in themselves- think Panorama, or any of the items in the wedding divertisment- think the Bluebird music. Others are pure coup de theatre- think the music leading up to and framing Aurora's entry. In this, a theme sweeps through the sections of the orchestra, all the sections combine in crescendo, then all falls silent apart from an oboe ostinato. Aurora steps out into this, just as you are waiting for something to happen. It's magic.

Tatiana’s letter scene is absolutely perfect. I grew up with Freni’s recording, who is decidedly not Russian, though she is nevertheless wonderful in the role.

R19 Eugene Onegin?

That fireworks song.

Augustine Hadelich playing Tchaikovsky's violin concerto

Piano Trio, op. 50. I had a friend who taught piano at the university level. This was one of his favorite performance pieces.

Screw all you bitches saying Tchaikovsky was gay, he knows how to please a lady!

Oslo Philharmonic playing Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 4.

Who doesn't love the opening horns?!

[quote] "Peter and the Wolf" is by Prokofiev, not Tchaikovsky

It's always been inexplicable to me how a culture as cold, grim and brutal as Czarist Russia would produce multiple artists of such brilliance.

Manfred Symphony

Mariss Janson and the Oslo Philharmonic

[quote] Who doesn't love the opening horns?!

R25 The woodwind players sitting in front of the horns.

Tchaikovsky 5, the second movement is one of the most beautiful things ever made

He was straight! He just never found the right girl

My first experience of Tchaikovsky was watching a TV special in the mid-50’ of the Saddlers Wells Ballet performing his “Sleeping Beauty.” I was entranced. It became the first lp recording I got my mother to buy me. (Nothing like a young gayling discovering art!)

Decades later, in the fall of 1989, I met a man, while crossing a street in London, and had a mini-affair. Turned out he had been a dancer in that same broadcast, and had later become the Artistic Director of The Royal Ballet, which had previously been the Saddlers Wells. Fascinating.

I am a devotee of orchestral film scores, and have often thought that Tchaikovsky wrote film scores before there were films to feature them.

Has anyone here seen this movie?

R3 Surprisingly his article on Russian Wikipedia has a whole chapter dedicated to him being a homosexualist. However, some wiki articles are censored in Russia, so who knows if people in Russia are even able to see that.

Stop saying he was gay or I'll arrest you!

R34 he wasn't gay, but a homosexual.

I love the music from Swan Lake. I’m also a fan of his tone poem Francesca da Rimini. I’ve played his 5th Symphony, and music from Sleeping Beauty. An interesting think about the Francesca piece was a sad melody that I would and recognize and know I’d heard it else where. Years later I figured it out. It was music from Eugène Onigen. It was a theme from Lensky’s aria before the duel scene.

He did have the gift for creating melodies out of his head that we never forget. I knew the melody to the waltz from The Sleeping Beauty when I was a toddler. I do love all his waltz music.

[quote] An interesting thing about the Francesca piece was a sad melody that I would and recognize and know I’d heard it elsewhere. Years later I figured it out. It was music from Eugène Onegin. It was a theme from Lensky’s aria before the duel scene.

R36 If you mean the music shown in the link below, you've got very good ears (if I recall correctly, you're a musician). I've listened to those pieces for decades and never made the connection. They're even in the same key. Francesca was composed in1876, and Onegin was composed in 1878, so that may be why that musical line was in both works. You may know that a descending scale or scale-like sequence of notes is a motif of doom and despair in Tchaikovsky's music. Francesca and Paulo, like Tatiana and Lensky, are doomed as lovers. Sometimes I think it was Tchaikovsky's doomed homosexuality that led to his frequent use of this motif, which may also have signified his approaching death in his last symphony.

On another note, when I was in 5th grade, the class went on a field trip to hear a children's concert performed by a local symphony orchestra. I had already played the piano for 3 years, but when I heard the waltz from Sleeping Beauty, and saw the violins, I decided I wanted to play the violin, and I've been doing that for 56 years. So yes, Tchaikovsky's music is special for me.

Speaking of downward scales. the great Pas de Deux from the Nutcracker was supposed to have its origin in a dare. Someone said to Tchaikovsky that no one could create some gorgeous dramatic melody out of something so plebian as a scale. Tchaikovsky said that he certainly could, and the result is linked below. Other pieces of trivia. Tchaikovsky had no interest in composing the Nutcracker and had pretty much given up on the idea. Then, in a visit to Paris, he heard a brand new instrument that had just been invented - the celesta (the name means heavenly). It was a keyboard instrument where each key is connected to a tiny tuned bell. Tchaikovsky loved the sound so much that he wanted to surprise the Russian audiences, who had never heard such a thing, by featuring it in the Nutcracker - and hence the famous Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.

The uneducated peasant above was referencing the 1812 overture, frequently performed at outdoor concerts. I have played it (at this point) for at least one hundred ballet performances of the Nutcracker. People in the audience always come up to me afterwards and ask me "what is THAT?" pointing to the celesta.

^^ Somehow my sentences jumped. While I play the cannon (on a synthesizer) for performances of the 1812 Overture, I don't play it for ballet performances of the Nutcracker!

Sugar Plum Fairy (very slow tempo, I suppose for the dancer)

He was in love with his nephew. 'Spit in an envelope and mail it to me.'

If he were alive today, he'd be the nephew troll

My next-door neighbors seem to have a limitless supply of screaming children when the weather’s good and one night at 9:30 pm it just became too much for me. So, I cracked the window, placed my portable little Wonderboom speaker on the sill, and blasted the 1812 overture at them.

It had no discernible effect on them but I felt that I’d at least done **something** rather than just continue suffer — and suffer and suffer — in silence.

Thanks, Pyotr. One less “senseless murder” averted, thanks to you.

*

Love Russell’s “Music Lovers.” Saw it in a theater in original release. Shocking and exhilarating. It was the first of Russell’s composer biographies I saw. He was able in his direction to convey what was happening inside the minds of these creatives.

He always went overboard, but his films could never be called dull to watch.

Though general audiences avoided them, his films were not financially unsuccessful, because they cost but little to make, mostly due to the fact that his wife, Shirley, designed and costumed them, effectively but frugally.

The best Nutcracker is the Bolshoi.

R22, thanks for the D major violin concerto ,my favorite Tchaikovsky piece. It’s so passionate. Also, Tchaikovsky had a gay brother, if not already mentioned…if anyone cares.

The Queen of Spades is a very great opera. I saw Freni twice in Onegin at the Met.

There are many clips of ballets by Balanchine with music by Tchaikovsky that were not meant for dance on youtube. Serenade(for strings) a classic and Diamonds done to his 3rd Symphony. Then there is Kirkland and Baryshnikov doing the Theme and Variations from his Suite No 3. A bit fuzzy because of that damn old video tape. I highly recommend you watching them. And get the entire Suite no 3 conducted by Boult.

Above somebody above mentioned Karajan and Berlin doing his 4,5, and 6 with Berlin on DG. It is fabulous. My favorite Nutcracker is the Ansermet pure magic. Sleeping Beauty is long and pure beauty from beginning to end. Many versions are cut. You want the whole thing. Like the Ermler. Dorati had the entire ballet on three cds but they cut it to put it on two. Probably available now on used cds available on Amazon and ebay if you don't stream. I don't.

Oh yeah and watch Margot Fonteyn doing The Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty. Though not as technically dazzling as more recent ballerinas she is the only one who brings out the excitement and passion in the music. The others just do it to show off like they're in a circus.

You could probably get the complete Dorati used on 3 cds. It is in a blue box.

R48 Dorati’s recording(s) of “The Waltz of the Flowers” from “The Nutcracker” is always identifiable because he removed the slurs from the 2-note descending figures that start in the last measure of the linked sheet music. I don’t know why he did it; it seems to break the flow of the waltz. I’ve never heard any other conductor do it.

Fonteyn is a famous Aurora r48. My understanding is that the role really exposes a dancer's balancing abilities, and Fonteyn had very good balance. She took over the role at Vic Wells (I think I've remembered it correctly) when Markova left. How could she compete with memories of that great dancer? Her solution was, during the first series of balances in the adagio, to raise her hand from a prince's hand to touch her other hand above her head, and balance during the change of prince. On her first performance of Aurora in New York with the Royal Fonteyn caught such good balance between princes that she didn't need any support from one of the princes so she just smiled him on. And a star was born!

Richter playing the Piano Concerto

I know it a super obvious and common answer, but I adore The Nutcracker.

Major pussyhound. Big Alexander III supporter!

I just WWed myself at r23. In addition to the Piano Trio, I love Symphonies 5 & 6. Bernstein's DG 6 was one of my first classical CDs.